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BYT Interviews: Nada Surf

Nada Surf’s bandleader Matthew Caws likes to ponder. He’s the introspective type, which you may have gleamed from the band’s records. He is also one hell of a nice guy. So if you ever have the chance to ask him a question, do it and expect a thoughtful response.

After 20 years of crafting intellect power-pop, Matthew should really be running therapy workshops for songwriters in need. Just check out the man’s track record. Nada Surf’s discography provides one of the best examples of how a band can mature gracefully over time. Every singer-songwriter dreams of having what Matthew Caws has – a distinct identity that hasn’t pigeonholed them into any one particular style.

The longevity Nada Surf enjoys has also meant they’ve had an opportunity to pretty much do everything. From working with different labels (and being screwed by some), doing a covers album, releasing a series of deep cut B-sides, to playing a show in a bullfighting ring. BYT was fortunate enough to be able to talk with Matthew about the band’s upcoming live album, which was recorded March 24, 2012 at the Neptune Theatre. The album is chock full of your favorite Nada tunes (except for “Popular” fair enough), and obviously some thoughtful stage banter from Mr. Caws.

With such a dense and varied discography to pull from it must be hard crafting the set list?Though I must say I think the new live album at Neptune Theatre does a good job showcasing the different facets and personalities of the band.

Thanks. I do feel like not only is it our own impression, but from requests and the way fans talk to us, and the songs they focus on, we sort of have this sense we’re two or three bands stuck in one. You know some people really focus on the love songs, other people on the sort of philosophical uplift…by love songs I mean for example, “The Inside of Love” and a uplifting, quasi-philosophical song would be “See These Bones.” And then, there are rockers. And we want to cater to the parts we like as well. But I really do feel like, possibly more so than other bands, that besides from the sound of my voice, which for better or for worse I can’t get away from, we really sound like two or three different bands.

That must be a good, solid place to be in as musician.

Yeah, definitely. It’s probably part of what keeps us going. That we don’t feel stuck doing one kind of thing. If you were in a really one styled band I could imagine waking up on tour one day and being like I’m sick of this.

So what we have to do, though is switch out standards, so a song like “Hyperspace,” for example, which we opened our set with for years, we just retired it completely for a while. The same thing with “Popular.” We didn’t play it for three or four years, now its back. It’s like volleyball, if you have more team members then positions on the court, you rotate them out. Or like any team. So maybe that’s it, the songs are team members and not everyone can be on the field at the same time.

We just go with our enthusiasm and excitement. If we’re not feeling jazzed about playing a certain song, there’s plenty more, we’ll just put it away for a while. But of course it gets a little harder with each record. There are three or four new songs I’m hoping to get to in these shows, but that means we’re going to have to drop a whole bunch of other ones that we’ve gotten use to and there’s a sense we need to play them at every show. But I guess that’s a good problem, and its just part of being in a band for a long time—the set list gets tricky.

One of the things I find so interesting about power-pop is the ability to play around with sound dynamics within familiar song structures. In a way do you feel like the structure of these songs—intro, verse, chorus, outro—allow you a kind of freedom to play comfortably mess with song dynamic?

In our case, it was a flow development. We weren’t as musically sophisticated as lot of other bands. On our second album there was a song called “80 Windows.” It was by far the quietest, slowest thing we’d ever done. And then on our next record, Let Go, there was like four songs that chilled out. It was slow for us to learn we didn’t have to rock all the time.

But you know we started in Manhattan, like two bands ago, it was the late 80s. Daniel (the bass player) and I used to practice once a week in mid-town, which made us play a little faster. In our first band, The Cost of Living, we only knew roughly four songs, maybe three, by the Clash, and one or two by Lords of the New Church. All we could afford was two hours a week, because nobody had a basement or anything. So I think the fact that we only had those two hours contributed to us growing-up playing pretty fast. We were just overexcited excited—you’ve been waiting the whole week to do it, you only have a couple hours, and it just put you in this forward-leaning state. I think it took us a while to shake that out of our bones. And still to a certain degree it will always be in me. I’ll always want things to cook. I think it may have been Johnny Marr that said, ‘I only have two speeds pretty fast and pretty slow.’

Either fast or slow there is still something enormously satisfying with a well written two to three-minute pop song.

My feeling about songs sometimes is not that they’re magic, but I think the analogy of a spell applies. That’s why I think the very beginning of songs are so important, and the very beginnings of recordings and mixes and stuff are so important, because you want to cast a spell over the listener and never have it break, and if you can get to three to four minutes without having lost that feeling of being arrested by it…if you like the song, of course, it could not be you’re thing, and never have gotten to you. But if the listeners are connecting, if you have them for three minutes, you’re probably done.

I always think this, that it only takes five minutes to write a great song, but finding those five minutes is hard, because sometimes those five minutes don’t come for months. That’s the problem; you can’t schedule them.

I heard you say that the title of your album “The Stars are Indifferent to Astronomy” is something your father, a philosophy professor, likes to say. Does philosophy factor into your writing, it often feels like your songs take on a more philosophical perspective?

I always hesitate to say it. I mean I appreciate it if someone says that about our songs because it’s definitely an aspect that I’m glad is there. But I’m hesitant to say it because, though my father is a philosophy professor, I never really studied it. Although I do have admiration for and am drawn to ideas for designs for living and morality and how you interact with other people and communities and what you try to focus on in life, though obviously we can’t always choose what we focus on. I guess its something I often find myself wrestling with.

So you would say you’re an introspective person?

Absolutely. To my own frustration I think. Because I sometimes really wish that I spent more of the day focused on the outside, but I keep being drawn back in, trying to figure myself out or improve my outlook or control it.

And it’s difficult to have a revelation when you’re stuck inside your head. That stuff tends to happen when you let yourself float, like with meditation.

I just started meditating again. I tried before and had troubles with it. But recently I turned the corner and realized the fact that I find it so difficult—that sense you have that you can’t empty your mind—is kind of the point anyway. Because if you could, if you could just calm your thoughts and focus on your breathing, if that came easily for you, you’d never be working that muscle—the muscle in your mind that quiets the noise and brings you back to the present. And so by failing again and again, you’re doing something, which is repeating that action of bringing yourself back to the physical present.

I met a man…his name is Stuart Firestein. I met this guy at a party and he was explaining that failure is so important, and if you’re only failing 30% to 40% of the time you’re not taking enough risk. You need to fail much more. His defense of it was that that was how ideas grow. He was speaking just from a scientific point of view, but I think it applies to life as well. At least you’re trying; at least you’re looking for something.

I also saw Bruce Springsteen once give a talk at SXSW, and he was talking about the importance of being able to hold on to two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. He was speaking specifically about the bands, and saying how it’s good for you to be confident and remember or focus on how you’re awesome, but it’s also important to remember that you suck. Holding on to those two things at once is part of the trick, and I think that’s the way it is in life as well. To remember that, certainly in terms of politics and dealing with communities, you need to be able to focus on many ideas at once, and if you hold on to one too tightly that’s where fanaticism comes from every stripe. Its dangerous because you need to be able to work with others and find common ground and you can only do that if you can accept differences in other people and by expecting those you’re allowing there to be various, and possibly opposing, ideas in yourself.

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The Comet is Coming is the soundtrack to an imagined apocalypse. In the aftermath of widespread sonic destruction what sounds remain? Who will lead the survivors to new sound worlds?

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The Comet is Coming is the soundtrack to an imagined apocalypse. In the aftermath of widespread sonic destruction what sounds remain? Who will lead the survivors to new sound worlds? Who will chart the new frontier?

In a warehouse somewhere in London 2013 a meeting would take place between three musical cosmonauts. They would pool their energies to build a vessel powerful enough to transport any party into outer space. King Shabaka (Sons of Kemet, Melt Yourself Down), Danalogue and Betamax (Soccer96).

Together they chart a path based on the encoded language of Sun Ra, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix and the BBC Radiophonic Workshops from which the band’s name emerged.

It is after the end of the world, the stage is a spacecraft, the mic is an accelerator. brace yourself for The Comet is Coming.

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The first Houses release in five years, Drugstore Heaven, marks a major artistic shift for L.A.-based songwriter/producer Dexter Tortoriello. Abandoning the heady concepts of his previous records for some

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The first Houses release in five years, Drugstore Heaven, marks a major artistic shift for L.A.-based songwriter/producer Dexter Tortoriello. Abandoning the heady concepts of his previous records for some of his tightest songwriting yet, Tortoriello is embracing the most fascinating character in his musical universe: himself.In 2010, Houses released their full-length debut All Night via Lefse Records — a Portland, Oregon-based label who signed the band two weeks after Tortoriello shared the project’s first single via Tumblr. The following year, Diplo tracked him down after finding his more darkly-charged project Dawn Golden on Bandcamp. In addition to signing Dawn Golden to Mad Decent, Diplo began bringing Tortoriello into co-writing sessions, which soon led to his work as a writer/featured vocalist for such artists as Martin Garrix, Ryan Hemsworth, and What So Not.

The past five years have been undeniably busy for Tortoriello. After relocating from Chicago to LA, he released Houses’ sophomore album A Quiet Darkness via Downtown Records in 2013, along with a debut full-length as Dawn Golden the following spring. A slate of high-profile remixes for Major Lazer, Kings of Leon and Odesza established him as a dance world heavyweight, while writing and producing for artists like Lil Yachty, Kali Uchis, and Kiiara refined his songcraft. And while he initially compartmentalized his creative efforts, Drugstore Heaven finds him drawing from these experiences, creating Houses’ most fully realized and complexly detailed output to date – a selection of songs matching graceful experimentation with raw emotion and unprecedented vulnerability.

“All of the Houses material to date has been very escapist,” Tortoriello says. “You can fall into a spell where real life is something you tune in and out of, something you feel no authorship over. I’ve focused my efforts over the last few years on building and reinforcing things I don’t wish to escape from: relationships, groups, creative outlets, ideas, workflows. I found a much deeper type of freedom in taking ownership over my life and committing myself to really living it.”

Drugstore Heaven delivers a dynamically textured sound partly shaped by Tortoriello’s exploration of rave and drum-and-bass artists from the late ’90s. “At the time all that stuff was coming out, electronic music was just being discovered, so there was this really pioneering sense of what was possible,” he says. The lead single “Fast Talk,” featuring backing vocals of longtime Houses member Megan Messina, unfolds in hazy rhythms formed from chopped-up breakbeats and live percussion from timpani, glockenspiel, and a couple bottles of antidepressant medication. “That song is meant to be a memorial for a group of friends I had back in my late teens,” explains Tortoriello, adding, “Thematically it’s almost like a ballet where you keep driving around the same blocks, and people start disappearing from the car because they’re going to jail or dying.”

Growing up outside Chicago, Tortoriello first started making music in his early teens, mostly by attempting to emulate the drum-and-bass-meets-speed-metal freakouts of Atari Teenage Riot. (“I’d record myself playing drums onto cassette, then double-speed the tape and play synthesizers over it,” he recalls. “It was an abomination.”). Sonic references to his teenage experimentation make melancholic rave workout “Years” all the more poignant, as Tortoriello examines the anxiety of ageing and the ennui of early adulthood in his lyrics.

On Drugstore Heaven, embracing the personal also has its joyful side. The EP’s punchiest moment, “Left Alone,” emerges as bright and bouncy anthem celebrating the bliss of solitude, while closer “Pink Honey” is a lavishly romantic number built on ethereal vocals, delicate guitar tones, and luminous synth. “I was trying to turn that one into a sweeping love song, like something out of Casablanca,” says Tortoriello.

For Tortoriello, the deepest achievement of Drugstore Heaven lies in building a body of work that feels entirely true to the world in his head. “In the past I’ve felt self-conscious about the person I put forth in my music, but these songs feel very reflective of who I really am,” he says. Being this open still feels new to him, but for the listener, it’s a rewarding glimpse into the mind of a vital and forward-thinking artist.

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There’s a great scene in The Last Waltz – the documentary about The Band’s final concert – where director Martin Scorsese is discussing music with drummer/singer/mandolin player Levon Helm. Helm

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There’s a great scene in The Last Waltz – the documentary about The Band’s final concert – where director Martin Scorsese is discussing music with drummer/singer/mandolin player Levon Helm. Helm says, “If it mixes with rhythm, and if it dances, then you’ve got a great combination of all those different kinds of music: country, bluegrass, blues music, show music…”To which Scorsese, the inquisitive interviewer, asks, “What’s it called, then?”“Rock & roll!”Clearly looking for a more specific answer, but realizing that he isn’t going to get one, Marty laughs. “Rock & roll…”Well, that’s the way it is sometimes: musicians play music, and don’t necessarily worry about where it gets filed. It’s the writers, record labels, managers, etc., who tend to fret about what “kind” of music it is.And like The Band, the members of Railroad Earth aren’t losing sleep about what “kind” of music they play – they just play it. When they started out in 2001, they were a bunch of guys interested in playing acoustic instruments together. As Railroad Earth violin/vocalist Tim Carbone recalls, “All of us had been playing in various projects for years, and many of us had played together in different projects. But this time, we found ourselves all available at the same time.”Songwriter/lead vocalist Todd Sheaffer continues, “When we started, we only loosely had the idea of getting together and playing some music. It started that informally; just getting together and doing some picking and playing. Over a couple of month period, we started working on some original songs, as well as playing some covers that we thought would be fun to play.” Shortly thereafter, they took five songs from their budding repertoire into a studio and knocked out a demo in just two days. Their soon-to-be manager sent that demo to a few festivals, and – to the band’s surprise – they were booked at the prestigious Telluride Bluegrass Festival before they’d even played their first gig. This prompted them to quickly go in and record five more songs; the ten combined tracks of which made up their debut album, “The Black Bear Sessions.”That was the beginning of Railroad Earth’s journey: since those early days, they’ve gone on to release five more critically acclaimed studio albums and one hugely popular live one called, “Elko.” They’ve also amassed a huge and loyal fanbase who turn up to support them in every corner of the country, and often take advantage of the band’s liberal taping and photo policy. But Railroad Earth bristle at the notion of being lumped into any one “scene.” Not out of animosity for any other artists: it’s just that they don’t find the labels very useful. As Carbone points out, “We use unique acoustic instrumentation, but we’re definitely not a bluegrass or country band, which sometimes leaves music writers confused as to how to categorize us. We’re essentially playing rock on acoustic instruments.”Ultimately, Railroad Earth’s music is driven by the remarkable songs of front-man, Todd Sheaffer, and is delivered with seamless arrangements and superb musicianship courtesy of all six band members. As mandolin/bouzouki player John Skehan points out, “Our M.O. has always been that we can improvise all day long, but we only do it in service to the song. There are a lot of songs that, when we play them live, we adhere to the arrangement from the record. And other songs, in the nature and the spirit of the song, everyone knows we can kind of take flight on them.” Sheaffer continues: “The songs are our focus, our focal point; it all starts right there. Anything else just comments on the songs and gives them color. Some songs are more open than others. They ‘want’ to be approached that way – where we can explore and trade musical ideas and open them up to different territories. But sometimes it is what the song is about.”So: they can jam with the best of them and they have some bluegrass influences, but they use drums and amplifiers (somewhat taboo in the bluegrass world). What kind of music is it then? Mandolin/vocalist John Skehan offers this semi-descriptive term: “I always describe it as a string band, but an amplified string band with drums.” Tim Carbone takes a swing: “We’re a Country & Eastern band! ” Todd Sheaffer offers “A souped-up string band? I don’t know. I’m not good at this.” Or, as a great drummer/singer/mandolin player with an appreciation for Americana once said: “Rock & roll!”

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There’s a great scene in The Last Waltz – the documentary about The Band’s final concert – where director Martin Scorsese is discussing

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There’s a great scene in The Last Waltz – the documentary about The Band’s final concert – where director Martin Scorsese is discussing music with drummer/singer/mandolin player Levon Helm. Helm says, “If it mixes with rhythm, and if it dances, then you’ve got a great combination of all those different kinds of music: country, bluegrass, blues music, show music…”To which Scorsese, the inquisitive interviewer, asks, “What’s it called, then?”“Rock & roll!”Clearly looking for a more specific answer, but realizing that he isn’t going to get one, Marty laughs. “Rock & roll…”Well, that’s the way it is sometimes: musicians play music, and don’t necessarily worry about where it gets filed. It’s the writers, record labels, managers, etc., who tend to fret about what “kind” of music it is.And like The Band, the members of Railroad Earth aren’t losing sleep about what “kind” of music they play – they just play it. When they started out in 2001, they were a bunch of guys interested in playing acoustic instruments together. As Railroad Earth violin/vocalist Tim Carbone recalls, “All of us had been playing in various projects for years, and many of us had played together in different projects. But this time, we found ourselves all available at the same time.”Songwriter/lead vocalist Todd Sheaffer continues, “When we started, we only loosely had the idea of getting together and playing some music. It started that informally; just getting together and doing some picking and playing. Over a couple of month period, we started working on some original songs, as well as playing some covers that we thought would be fun to play.” Shortly thereafter, they took five songs from their budding repertoire into a studio and knocked out a demo in just two days. Their soon-to-be manager sent that demo to a few festivals, and – to the band’s surprise – they were booked at the prestigious Telluride Bluegrass Festival before they’d even played their first gig. This prompted them to quickly go in and record five more songs; the ten combined tracks of which made up their debut album, “The Black Bear Sessions.”That was the beginning of Railroad Earth’s journey: since those early days, they’ve gone on to release five more critically acclaimed studio albums and one hugely popular live one called, “Elko.” They’ve also amassed a huge and loyal fanbase who turn up to support them in every corner of the country, and often take advantage of the band’s liberal taping and photo policy. But Railroad Earth bristle at the notion of being lumped into any one “scene.” Not out of animosity for any other artists: it’s just that they don’t find the labels very useful. As Carbone points out, “We use unique acoustic instrumentation, but we’re definitely not a bluegrass or country band, which sometimes leaves music writers confused as to how to categorize us. We’re essentially playing rock on acoustic instruments.”Ultimately, Railroad Earth’s music is driven by the remarkable songs of front-man, Todd Sheaffer, and is delivered with seamless arrangements and superb musicianship courtesy of all six band members. As mandolin/bouzouki player John Skehan points out, “Our M.O. has always been that we can improvise all day long, but we only do it in service to the song. There are a lot of songs that, when we play them live, we adhere to the arrangement from the record. And other songs, in the nature and the spirit of the song, everyone knows we can kind of take flight on them.” Sheaffer continues: “The songs are our focus, our focal point; it all starts right there. Anything else just comments on the songs and gives them color. Some songs are more open than others. They ‘want’ to be approached that way – where we can explore and trade musical ideas and open them up to different territories. But sometimes it is what the song is about.”So: they can jam with the best of them and they have some bluegrass influences, but they use drums and amplifiers (somewhat taboo in the bluegrass world). What kind of music is it then? Mandolin/vocalist John Skehan offers this semi-descriptive term: “I always describe it as a string band, but an amplified string band with drums.” Tim Carbone takes a swing: “We’re a Country & Eastern band! ” Todd Sheaffer offers “A souped-up string band? I don’t know. I’m not good at this.” Or, as a great drummer/singer/mandolin player with an appreciation for Americana once said: “Rock & roll!”

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“You just try to see the thingfor what it isand what it isisa heartbreaking,soulshaking,overwhelmingexhalation.”

– “Defibrillation”

To begin their third album, The Barr Brothers had to make some noise together. No plans or distractions, no preconceptions. No friends or strangers, label reps or engineers, no cellphone trills or city sound. No partners. No children. Not even any notebooks of lyrics – verses, choruses, chords preconsidered and plotted out. For the first time the band’s three members – namesake siblings Brad and Andrew Barr, harpist Sarah Pagé – would go songless into studio. Empty-handed, whole-hearted, down miles of snowy road to a cabin on a frozen lake, a place full of windows and microphones and starlight and sunshine, with amplifiers in the bedrooms, their volumes turned up loud.

They spent a whole week playing. These were improvisations lasting hours at a time – noons and midnights, dusks and dawns, a chance to remember who they were and who they were becoming. Some of this was groove: patterns inspired by India, West Africa and 808 drum machines, deeper and heavier than what they’d tried before. Some of it came from Pagé’s new inventions: humbuckers, Kleenex-box signal-splitters, hacks to make her harp into a versatile, sub-bass-booming noisemaker. But there was also plain old guitar – songs opened up by that big electric sound. Brad had asked, “How do we make music when there is no song?” The answer was this roaming, three-dimensional music, filled with nostalgia and experiments and rolling space, found on the fringes of Saint Zenon, Québec (pop. 1,1150).

The stakes felt high. The success of 2014’s Sleeping Operator had taken the band from Montreal to Nashville to Milan, from the Newport Folk Festival to The Late Show with David Letterman. By now everyone knew the story of the American brothers who had decamped for Canada; how they had discovered Pagé by hearing her harp through a shared apartment wall. LP3 would be brought into a world where Trump was president. Where both Barrs were fathers. And where thousands of fans were waiting for the band’s next volley.

Queens of the Breakers was born in three sessions at that cabin in the country, a place called the Wild Studio. Brad took those first free sounds and distilled them into tidal, seeking songs – stories of the way lovers and companions fall in and out of sync. More recording followed at Studio Mixart, in Montreal, and at the group’s own boiler-room of a practice space. The result is this: 11 tracks of blazing courage and failing resolve; music suffused with low grooves and darting melodies, subtle breakages, the Barr Brothers’ wide-open sense of the blues.

Some of this album takes place in the past. “Song That I Heard”, with its memories of Brad’s arrival in Montreal, the different ways he fell in love. Or Queens’ title track, which revisits the Barrs’ misspent youth – a gang of friends rambling through Rhode Island mansions, dressed in their mothers’ dresses, wreaking small havocs. How many of our old friends do we still see? How many of those dreams came true? At times the sound’s all twinkling, the score for a lost John Hughes film; at other times it’s whetted, searching, like the stuff of Lhasa de Sela or Led Zeppelin’s III.

The rawest reminder of Queens’ first jams appears on “Kompromat”, which bristles with rattle and riff, Pagé’s kora-like harp. “I think we’re in love with your abuse,” Brad snarls at his homeland. “You got one hand on the driver’s wheel / in the other a noose.” On Queens of the Breakers’ magnificent opening cut, “Defibrillation”, the reckoning is softer – but not necessarily kinder. “Defibrillation” was built atop a drumbeat, something Andrew found at a hospital one Christmas night. Sitting with his mother, holding her hand – she had fallen, needed stitches – he observed a pair of heart monitors, each connected to a different, unseen person’s pulse. They were beating together, then not, and not: parting and crisscrossing. He tried to memorize the pattern. Later, at home, he learned to play it on bass-drum and snare and tom. When he sent the beat to his brother, Brad sent back the beginnings of this: a song like a letter from a father to his son. “I just thought I’d save you some time,” he offers, “straighten it out here / make it rhyme.” Still, the singer’s not peddling fake wisdom . For all its striving, “Defibrillation” is a letter without answers, a gesture into space, a lament for the dither that exists between every human being.

It’s this tension, this dither, that lives at the centre of Queens of the Breakers. Three players – friends, comrades, music-makers, all of them trying to play in sync. Three bandmates – each of them fumbling, remembering, trying to invent something together. A band still playing, even occasionally reimagining, their rock’n’roll.

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Post-post-modern diva Meow Meow has hypnotized, inspired, and terrified audiences globally. The spectacular crowd-surfing queen of song had her New York Pops debut in 2015 at Forest

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Post-post-modern diva Meow Meow has hypnotized, inspired, and terrified audiences globally. The spectacular crowd-surfing queen of song had her New York Pops debut in 2015 at Forest Hills Stadium with Pink Martini, and her London Philharmonic debut in 2013 as Jenny in Brecht/Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper in Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and London’s Royal Festival Hall. She sold out her Lincoln Center American Songbook Series and Sydney Opera House concerts, toured the concert halls of Australia with Barry Humphries and the Australian Chamber Orchestra singing 1920‘s works from Weimar Germany, and in 2014 performed contemporary opera with the LA Philharmonic in Andriessen’s De Materie and for Pina Bausch Company with their Fest für Pina 40 season in Germany, followed by an extended season of the award-winning original music comedy work Feline Intimate in London at the Southbank Centre and again a critically acclaimed season at London’s Southbank with her Apocalypse Meow. Meow starred on London’s West End in Kneehigh Theatre and Michel Legrand’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and in her own solo concerts at the legendary Apollo Theatre. David Bowie, Pina Bausch and Mikhail Baryshnikov are amongst her curators, and she has created works for festivals from Shanghai to Wroclaw as well as performing everything from Schubert and Schumann with orchestra to touring with punk outfit Amanda Palmer and The Dresden Dolls.

Named One of the Top Performers of the Year by the New Yorker, multi-award winning Meow Meow has been called “Sensational” (the Times UK), “diva of the highest order” (New York Post), “The Queen of Chanson” by the Berliner Zeitung, and “a phenomenon” by the Australian press. She opened Berkeley Rep’s 2014 season with the new music theatre work An Audience with Meow Meow. Upcoming: Brecht/Weill’s Die Sieben Todsünden for Orchestra Victoria, and further collaborations with the Australian Chamber Orchestra from Slovenia to Sydney Opera House, further performances with Oregon Symphony , with Pink Martini and the London Philharmonic. Meow’s albums Vamp and Songs from a Little Match Girl are available on iTunes. meowmeowrevolution.com

THOMAS M. LAUDERDALE (piano)

Thomas Lauderdale was raised on a plant nursery in rural Indiana. He began piano lessons at age six with Patricia Garrison. When his family moved to Portland in 1982, he began studying with Sylvia Killman, who to this day continues to serve as his coach and mentor. He has appeared as soloist with numerous orchestras and ensembles, including the Oregon Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Portland Youth Philharmonic, Chamber Music Northwest and Oregon Ballet Theatre (where he collaborated with choreographer James Canfield and visual artists Storm Tharp and Malia Jensen on a ballet based on Felix Salten’s Bambi, written in 1923).

In 2008, he played Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F with the Oregon Symphony under the direction of Christoph Campestrini. Lauderdale returned as soloist with the Oregon Symphony in multiple concerts in 2011, and again in 2015, under the direction of Carlos Kalmar. In 2017, he and his partner Hunter Noack created and performed a dazzling, rhapsodic two-piano arrangement of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with choreographer Nicolo Fonte for Oregon Ballet Theatre.

Active in Oregon politics since a student at U.S. Grant High School (where he was student body president), Thomas served under Portland Mayor Bud Clark and Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt. In 1991, he worked under Portland City Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury on the drafting and passage of the city’s civil rights ordinance. He graduated with honors from Harvard with a degree in History and Literature in 1992. He spent most of his collegiate years, however, in cocktail dresses, taking on the role of “cruise director” … throwing waltzes with live orchestras and ice sculptures, disco masquerades with gigantic pineapples on wheels, midnight swimming parties, and operating a Tuesday night coffeehouse called Café Mardi.

Instead of running for political office, Lauderdale founded Pink Martini in 1994 to play political fundraisers for progressive causes such as civil rights, the environment, affordable housing and public broadcasting. In addition to his work with Pink Martini, Lauderdale is currently working on three different recording projects with international superstar and singing sensation Meow Meow, the surf band Satan’s Pilgrims and singer/civil rights leader Kathleen Saadat.

In Spring 2008, Lauderdale completed his first film score for Chiara Clemente’s documentary Our City Dreams, a portrait of five New York City-based women artists of different generations. In 2016, Lauderdale created the score and three featured songs for the Belgian film Souvenir, starring the legendary French actress Isabelle Huppert.

Lauderdale currently serves on the boards of the Oregon Symphony, Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Oregon Historical Society, Confluence Project with Maya Lin and the Derek Rieth Foundation. He lives with his partner Hunter Noack in downtown Portland, Oregon.

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Acclaimed producer/songwriter/performer Maggie Rogers will release her Capitol Records debut album, Heard It In A Past Life, on January 18, 2019. Her new single, “Light On,” is out now. Written

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Acclaimed producer/songwriter/performer Maggie Rogers will release her Capitol Records debut album, Heard It In A Past Life, on January 18, 2019. Her new single, “Light On,” is out now. Written by Rogers, the song was produced by Greg Kurstin Kid Harpoon Rogers and premiered as Zane Lowe’s World Record on Apple Music’s Beats 1. Heard It In A Past Life includes the song that introduced Rogers to the world, “Alaska,” which has accrued over 100 million global combined streams to date. The album also contains the follow-up singles “Fallingwater,” praised by NPR as “a celebration of the terrifying yet thrilling process of change” and “Give A Little,” which Pitchfork hailed as “cathartic pop song about empathy and unity.” Maggie Rogers grew up in Easton, Maryland. After graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she released her critically acclaimed debut EP, Now That The Light Is Fading. The BBC, Tidal, Google Play, Vevo, Pandora and numerous publications – including Rolling Stone, NYLON, SPIN, Billboard and more – have tipped her as an artist to watch. NPR named her one of its Favorite Musicians and The New Yorker declares, “Maggie Rogers is an artist of her time.”